


The Witness

by orphan_account



Category: AFI
Genre: Adultery, Ambiguous Relationships, Angst, Decemberunderground era, Dysfunctional Relationships, Jealousy, M/M, Polyamory
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-01-25
Updated: 2013-01-25
Packaged: 2017-11-26 21:49:40
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 4,470
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/654765
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/orphan_account/pseuds/orphan_account
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Davey is with Jade. He's also sleeping with Nils.</p>
            </blockquote>





	The Witness

**Author's Note:**

> This story was, bizarrely, not inspired by the BA song of the same name. I finished it and thought that was the best fitting name, because it's about being witnessed, and the incompletion of that act seeming complete in and of itself. I looked up the lyrics to the BA song, and they're not perfect, but they're pretty damn close to what I was going for. But that's all coincidence, weirdly enough. Also weird, this is my first Nilvey story. I don't even know why. I don't own them, this never happened.

It’s November, and the wind sounds like sobbing. There are yellow leaves spiraling outside in the night, brighter in the golden glow of a street lamp. As you take your jacket from the hook it hangs on beside the door, you feel like you’re somewhere smaller than home, even though home is already a very small place. 

The pavement under those yellow leaved trees, some nut tree, is littered with organic matter and trodden upon shells, because these are the trees the parrots dismantle every morning before the sun rises. 

The legend is that there was a fire at a pet store, but you’re not sure because legends come from places but that doesn’t mean those places are real, especially if they’re fires at pet stores. But the legend says that California is a perfect climate for Green Indian Ring Necked Parakeets, and when this pet store burned down, all the rabbits and rats and hamsters were picked off by house cats, the dogs turned into strays and the fish boiled alive in their tanks. But the Green Indian Ring Necked Parakeets flourished, multiplied, turned into an entire flock. Now they wake you up along with the traffic every morning, tearing up the trees. 

It’s three days before your birthday, eleven before Jade’s. 

Even now, when it’s nothing, you know it’s something. Nils’s name is undisguised in your contacts list, though you’ve thought about coming up with a pseudonym, for no one’s sake. You’re going to meet him, even though he is twenty one and you are much, much older, and he smokes and smells like it when you kiss his neck through his hair. 

There are foot steps behind you, hands that were once sure clasped in front of a rigid body rather than resting upon the slope of your shoulders. Two pairs of eyes watch the leaves rain down among the parrot-induced carnage on the pavement, listen to the wind sobbing. “Have fun,” He says drolly, his voice dead and free from its usual golden tones. 

It hurts you with a deep, longing hurt between your lungs, and for a moment you think about staying. But your own hands are cold, and there is something itching in your flesh that you can’t scratch because your nails aren’t long enough and his are too long and you feel untouched and untouchable because of this. 

“I will,” you are telling the truth, even though truth is a many colored thing. You tie your hair up, feel its weight lifting off your neck, rustling back down onto it. The air smells like shampoo, and you are sick at the knowledge that it reminds you of what your body smells like when it’s next to Nils’s body, that (how did it become?) familiar perfume of sweat and this shampoo and another shampoo and another’s sweat and cigarettes. 

“I love you,” He says. 

“I love you too,” you are telling the truth. 

_______

It’s easy when you feel invisible. You’d think that being at a club, surrounded by so much young flesh, you’d feel a spectacle, you’d feel scrutinized, put on display. There are so many witnesses, but instead of feeling witnessed you feel erased. Safe inside that lack. You think that maybe this is because when you are the center of so much worship, you’re being seen incorrectly by so many eyes as something flawless and infallible. Which is the same as not being seen at all. 

The music is loud, and your ears have been so abused for so many years you can’t even hear what the song is, merely feel it resonate within you like a second heartbeat. You let it drive you, and watch his body through a haze of red-white light and smoke machine smoke. There are other bodies, but at the center of them all is Nils, narrow and so young and unblemished, with his wide red mouth and skin paler than yours ever was. 

You are not good at dancing with people, because you’re a performer and it’s impossible to share the spotlight when other people think they’re performers, too. Nils does not think he is a performer, though. He loves being a smaller, frailer thing shuddering under your shadow, he loves saying you name when he comes. He loves telling you all the ways you touch him that no one else does, he loves that you are something different than him. 

Nils is complimentary to you spotlight, because he’s not an equal, like Jade is an equal. This is why you dance with him, this is why you stand behind him and manipulate his body which is smaller than yours, which feels strange and new and right because it’s different from the body you’re used to, which is smaller but taller so you always feel crushed, which you used to love but now scares you. 

There’s sweat on his downy stomach, and he smells ashy grey and amber like cologne. Your nose nudges up against his ear, and you tongue the salt off the shell, kiss hard enough to bend his cartilage into a new shape you imagined and created. 

His hands cover yours, smaller, softer. 

Later that night, when you fuck him into his mattress at his mother’s house, you come to the image of his head thrown back and his dark hair awry, because his chin is tilted so that it seems sharper, more angular, and he almost looks like you. 

____________

 

You didn’t plan this. All the other people you fucked were a function of fucking Jade. You would come home, (because then it was still home instead of smallness), and you’d stand at the foot of the bed where Jade was lying with a book on his lap and a smile on his face. You’d struggle out of your pants, out of your shirt, smelling sharp and acidic from the sweat you sweat when you’re dancing, fucking. 

You’d frantically tell him all the ways in which this fucking was different from the way he fucked. You’d tell him about how girls taste so different and their backs bend the opposite way, creating indentations rather than the rounded mountain before the snap of hips ending in being filled. You’d tell him about the girls, and the boys too. Anyone, everyone. How easily they’d come, how different they smelled, tasted, felt. How they’d felt good, great even, but not right. 

Then you would crawl back into that bed where Jade was waiting, and your skin would become absolved, indestructible to any hands save for Jade’s hands. It wouldn’t matter whether or not you cleaned other spit, other sweat, other seed off of your skin, all that touched your skin became Jade’s and so it didn’t seem like someone else’s. You’d fuck him, open mouthed and open bodied, in awe that there was something untarnished in its rightness. 

Nils is the only other person who’s felt right. This is because Jade is not what you need right now. You need a break from being whole in your combined incompleteness. You need a break from perfection. Because you’re not sure perfection is what you want right now, because you’re not sure _what_ you want right now. 

You didn’t plan it. It just happens. Nils is so young, and there’s something about the lack of perfection in newness, in youth, that becomes in and of itself, perfect. Perfectly flawed, because the most evident flaw in Nils is his worship of you. The way he cannot see _your_ flaws. And maybe _that_ is what you want. 

He is imperfect. He doesn’t suck you off as good as Jade does; he doesn’t know how to start things slow and build. He’s all fingertips and working hips but you like that about him, because his desperation for you is so immense and real in its intensity that you can drown in it. He’s small enough to flip over or hold up against the wall, and he lets you do both of these things, all while he looks back at you with blue eyes reduced to mostly pupil and disbelief and the heat of wanting. 

And you think that this might be what you want, so you might come back and tell Jade about it the first time, the second, but it stops rendering brightness in his eyes. The certainty that everything that touches you is his begins to fade from him and his hands are less sure, his mouth and body less open. You start to feel like there’s a growing thing inside your body, except its not a thing, it’s an absence, and it keeps getting bigger the more you feed it, but you can’t help feeding it because your need is bigger than anything else around you. 

Now you come home and you still tell Jade about it, but not frantically, and not without guilt. You step into the shower before you slide into bed, and wash dried come from the hairs on your stomach, and feel the absence inside of you expand like a black hole. 

____________

At first Nils wants to know about it. He asks you questions, eagerly, while collapsed on top of you into a boneless shape of milk-white skin, bones like swan’s bones jutting through melted pearls and drying sweat. One lamp is on, with his turquoise hoodie thrown over it so everything is cast in sea shades. You trace the edges of his scapula with sure fingers, your dick still half-hard because at this point he hadn’t figured out how to make you come yet. 

_How long have you guys been together?  
Why don’t you tell anyone?   
Doesn’t he care that we’re hooking up?   
Why didn’t he introduce me to you for so long?   
Who fucks who?  
How does he touch you?   
How does he make you come?   
Like this? _

You pull his hands off of you and pin them above his head, kiss the pink indentation between his eyes where his glasses rested earlier tonight. You shake your head, kiss lower and lower until you’re in his underarm where you inhale this new smell, the tanginess of his boy-skin, the almost pubescent sharpness of young sweat. You don’t answer, just let him cant up against you, chase your lips, and smile and smile because he keeps trying. 

_______

At first Jade wants to know about it. He asks you questions, nonchalantly, while he fills the coffee maker with grounds and cold water, then pushes the start button, hair a wreck in the back and sweatpants rolled up to the calf. It’s morning and you’re still sore from fucking both of them last night, the muscles in your ass tight and aching from so much controlled thrusting. The skin of your dick is red and tender and you think, miraculously, that you don’t want to be touched there for a few days, even though that doesn’t seem fair to either of them. 

_Does he ask about me at all?  
Is he in love with you?   
Do you think he would be if I didn’t exist?   
Does he want more of you than you can offer?  
Who fucks who?   
How does he touch you?   
Has he figured out how to make you come?   
Like this? _

You pull his hands off of you and set them down on the counter on either side of your hips, because every inch of you feels bruised, used up, empty. There are dark circles under Jade’s eyes which means there are darker circles under yours. You shake your head, dark curls tumbling on your shoulders, and Jade lets his fingers tangle in them, which, right now, is an okay way for him to touch you. Sighing, you don’t answer, just wish you could escape the overwhelming fear in his eyes, because you are so sick of trying. 

_________

 

Halloween is your favorite holiday, but you haven’t gone out on that night for years. It feels strange to be here, at someone’s decorated home where ceramic bowls rest on every available surface, full of unwrapped candy, chocolate peanuts, yogurt cranberries, liquors, other things you cannot eat. You feel disconnected from this setting, the low lights and the laughing faces in white make up, black make up, fake blood. Nils’s hand, small and held tight within your own, anchors you to your own body. 

Your mouth tastes of so much foreign spit. You’ve kissed nearly everyone here, sometimes languidly, with tongue, sometimes firmly, clumsily, colliding teeth and the bitter memory of champagne. Each time is disgusts you, these chemical mouths, these clouds of perfume and hairspray. But nothing at this party smells or tastes of Jade, so you continue searching. Or perhaps you’re reveling in something. You’re not sure, because even though Nils has taken you outside four times so that he can smoke, and he has a plastic cup of something golden and horrible smelling in his other hand, you keep kissing him, and it keeps making you dizzy with wanting. Maybe because it is different. Maybe because you don’t want it, which makes you want it more. 

Some boy whose name you’ve already asked and already forgotten just threw up in the sink, and you haven’t seen him brush his teeth or even swig some water but you’re letting his mouth push against yours, messy and parted while yours stays closed tight. There are camera flashes, and one hand on your shoulder to balance because his other arm is in a cast and he can’t move. You hear Nils’s voice, raspy and familiar behind you somewhere, tell someone, _God no, we’re not together. He can do whatever he wants. We’re just friends._

You wonder if Jade has ever had to respond to a question in that way. You wonder if either of them are lying, or if neither of them are. You wipe frothy saliva off your mouth, and laugh, because you’re being watched and witnessed by so many adoring eyes. 

People mill around, and you hang back where the music is because it makes you feel safer, and even though Nils is talking to girls, (twins), you know he’s orbiting around you, wondering where you are, if you’re within grabbing distance. You creep up behind him, put your hands on either side of his narrow, firm waist and squeeze, chin on his shoulder. 

When he turns to look at you his eyes are half lidded and loaded, and you suggest that there might be an empty room upstairs somewhere, a bathroom even, with a towel rack he can hold himself up with while you fuck him against a locked door. Because he’s young and unafraid of all the things Jade was afraid of when you were sneaking around all those years ago, he nods fervently, takes your hand, follows you anywhere. 

There’s a line for the bathroom but the master bedroom is free, and there’s a huge bed with scarlet sheets and Nils’s skin looks delectable against the color of blood, while he lays spread out on his stomach with his ass in the air, and you feel invisible and eternal while you drive yourself to abandon inside of him. 

____________

Jade touches you like you’re breakable now, even when all you want him to do is get mad, throw you over the arm of the couch and fuck you to pieces, remind you that you’re his no matter whose come is sloshing around in your stomach from the night before. Sometimes he puts his elbow against your throat and pushes you against the kitchen counter so hard you have a bruise in your back the next day, but he doesn’t go any farther than that because you are so impassive and detached that he thinks you don’t want it. 

You don’t know how to tell him that you _do_ want it, so badly, but you need him to not be scared away by your inability to do anything but lie there and take it like the vacancy you are, the vacancy you’ve become, recently voiceless and only just remembering how to sing again. 

His hands are so much bigger than Nils’s hands, so when he touches you now it feels like you’re being covered, smothered. His tongue is more insistent, his legs longer, his weight more to bear. When he kneels between your thighs his mouth is the perfect height for your dick, where Nils has to tilt his head up, fight through the sore neck and the deafening palms on either side of his head holding him in place because he still can’t tell when you’re getting close. 

You and Jade are like the inside of a clock, fitting together and working together and moving together like a machine, like something built to function, something so steady and perfect and fashioned for itself that you could set your watch by it. You and Nils are like a storm, messy and inelegant and unsatisfying in your rage to meet an end that never comes, incomplete and full of empty space where wind rushes in. You are exhausted and sore and broken after fucking Nils because you have to work so much harder to get off, you are exhausted and sore and broken after fucking Jade because it feels too good to take a break from. You’re not sure if you’re tired of tick ticking. You’re not sure if you need a break. You’re not sure if you want to break. 

The first time Jade made you come, all he did was lie on top of you and move. You were both wearing your clothes; you were not much older than twenty; your heart and your body were the same and they both belonged to him. You feel like you did nothing. You want nothing. r32;  
The first time Nils makes you come, it almost hurts because his hands are too rough and he’s been touching you for the better part of an hour. You’re both amazed when it happens, and he nearly sobs with how much he wants it; he licks it up your chest, his hands shaking and forearms tense and burning in this visible way. You feel like you did everything. You want everything. 

Jade wants to give you everything, but he thinks you’re still wanting nothing, which is a fair thing to think because you don’t know how to speak, how to ask for things, how to do anything but stand there like a blow up doll while he does all the work, and quits out of fear because you are a working man. Nils wants to give you everything, and he can, because he has very little to give, and you have even less. 

Everything you have you’ve given to Jade. You tell him this once, in a fight, and he finally gets mad, throws you over the arm of the couch and fucks you to pieces, reminds you that you’re his no matter whose come is sloshing around in your stomach from the night before. You cry with your face pressed into a cushion that smells like cat hair, and come all over the gingham without being touched. 

________

You’re starting to forget what goes where. 

You’ll be on your back, some thin, lithe, sweat-slick body rubbing itself against yours in ernest. Your hands will claw at hard flesh, grip a well muscled ass, and as you shoot your load and your mind turns into static, you won’t say anyone’s name because you won’t remember which is the appropriate one to use. 

You’ll be sitting on your heels, Nils’s body in your lap and your dick balls-deep in the infernal heat of his ass, his bony legs wrapped around you, your hand on his spine, and you’ll tell him how good he looks riding you like that, and wonder whether it’s Jade who likes to know he looks good doing things, or Nils. 

You’ll try and push Jade’s knees into his chest, try and pretzel him into a position you love grinding against, and realize that he’s not flexible enough, see the cloudiness of lust leaving his eyes for a moment to be replaced with surprise, confusion, then loneliness. 

You’ll start a sentence with _remember that time_ when you’re easing a finger into the tight burn of Nils’s ass, crooking your finger against his prostate so he hisses and his dick twitches a bead of salty translucence onto his abdomen, _I made you come from just touching you here_ and he’ll open his eyes to look at you, because you have never made him come from just touching him there, and you are remembering a different time. 

You’ll be at the grocery store, waiting in line and leaning against your cart, distantly aware your clothes smell like sex, and someone’s seed, but not sure whose seed it is. 

You’ll be kissed awake, but not sure by who. 

You stare at your reflection in a partially fogged mirror before you step into the shower, and instead of seeing one face, you see two, and neither of them is yours. 

________________

 

After fucking Nils for the first time in his new apartment, you lie on your side, his body in your arms. Your eyes are closed, breath moving loose strands of black hair softer and finer than your own across his kissed shoulder. Things are quiet, and you think you might be able to sleep soon, but he rolls over. 

You try not to look at each other for too long, usually, after you both come. Usually you just fall asleep with your arm tossed hot and heavy over his little hips, or you lounge around long enough for your sweat to dry and your limbs to solidify into hateful blocks of hard work and soreness, then kiss him goodbye and drive home. 

Looking at each other is something you’re afraid to do, because you like fucking him too much to be unaffected by all the feelings that compel you after orgasm. When he’s all soft and warm and sweaty and loose-jointed after you’ve fucked him into the mattress, you can’t keep his gaze held in yours without smiling an explosive, dog-easy smile that Jade hasn’t seen in years. So to keep your face hard and uncaring, you shut your eyes, you welcome sleep. 

He’s staring at you, and you feel perfect. Perfectly witnessed, perfectly invisible, perfectly incomplete. 

“I miss you when you’re gone,” he says in a quiet voice, eyes hooded and heavy. His lips are pink, swollen from sucking you off. You lean in, try to lick those lips apart instead of replying but he twists away. “Is that okay?” 

“It’s okay,” you say, fighting that smile off of your treacherous mouth. You still yourself, inhale sharply, and disappear again. 

He makes a pouting face, it says, _make me feel better_. “I know I can’t have you all the time. I don’t even want you all the time. I just miss you when you’re gone.” 

“Ohhh, baby,” you say, even though you usually try not to call him babe or baby, even though you’ve never called Jade either of those things or anything close to them. He makes a little kitten noise, which gets muffled as you drag his face into your shoulder and squeeze him to you so he won’t see you become vulnerable, he can’t witness your happiness, your infallibility. 

“I miss you too,” You are telling the truth. 

______________

Jade is mired in bed, waiting for you, but you’re not coming. You’re leaving. Not forever, not even long enough to pack a suitcase. Just for a few days, maybe, just long enough for you become erased again. Long enough for you to sustain this invisibility for awhile, until Jade steals it again and you are forced to be complete. Perfect, imperfect in your perfection. Incomplete. 

You’re watching your departure hurt him. His eyes are dark and flat, his hands clenched white-knuckled in your sheets. Part of you wants to go lie beside him, part of you wants what you always wanted and always want. But most of you doesn’t. 

You are so afraid of him being afraid. You want the safety of Nils’s boundless adoration, his young skin, his flexible back and eyes that say _I miss you_ rather than _I love you_ because you were never his to love. You want to escape to being the most beautiful thing in the world, the most beautiful thing in this child’s bed, a savior come incarnate to save him from his own mundane suburban life, because that is the worst thing in Nils’s life: the mundane. You want the simplicity of that existence, of being worshiped rather than loved, of being a god rather than an equal. 

You want to suck the youth out of him, because you are tired of the pain of being loved and loving. You want to believe love is this salvation in your future, rather than the agony of your existence. 

“Why can’t you go somewhere else? To one of your other friends?” Jade lets himself beg, and you wish he wasn’t begging because it only makes you want to leave more. 

“Because I miss Nils,” You are telling the truth. 

Your eyeliner is on, your hair up. You’ve lost weight, and you want someone to notice. You want someone to be attentive to every detail of you like you’re a new thing, too. You want to be attentive to someone’s every detail. You want to be attentive to Nils, because Nils is a witness to imperfection by thinking there is none. 

“Why?” 

“I don’t know,” You lie for the first time. “I just do.” 

Jade puts his face in his hands, and curls up tighter in on himself. You want him to get mad, throw you over the arm of the couch and fuck you to pieces, remind you that you’re his no matter whose come is sloshing around in your stomach from the night before. And if he can’t do that (which he can’t) then you want him to go fuck someone else, you want him to find some beautiful young thing that looks like he wished he looked when he was twenty; you want him to have a witness, too, so that he can understand. 

“I don’t understand,” He says, voice muffled by hands. 

“I’m sorry.” You are impassive, silent, but breakable, if he tried to break you. But he does not try to break you, he stays in bed, under the sheets he grips with white knuckles. 

You’re almost outside your room when you remember to say, “I love you,” You are telling the truth. 

The air is quiet between you for a long time, heavy and wet with all of the things you cannot do for one another right now. 

Finally, he mumbles, “I love you too, Dave.”


End file.
